The list had eleven items on it. Kai stared at it after dinner, cross-legged on his bedroom floor, Mana regenerating steadily while the apartment settled into nighttime quiet.
Eleven things he understood deeply enough from Earth to create right now — not theoretically, not eventually — *tonight.* He read through them slowly. Antibiotics. Analgesics with real pharmacological precision. High-density caloric supplements. A carbon-fiber equivalent material he could form into basic shapes. Electromagnetic flash compounds — already proven. Thermite. Concentrated stimulants within safe dosage ranges. A water purification compound. Structural adhesive stronger than anything this world's chemistry had reached. An antiseptic solution that would make this world's medical community quietly lose their minds. And at the bottom, underlined twice: *Mana Conductivity Enhancer — theoretical. Test first.* He tapped that last one.
Every cultivator and Awakener in Neo-Eden absorbed ambient Mana to power their abilities and growth. The efficiency of that absorption was determined by their stats and rank. Nobody questioned it — it was simply how the world worked, like gravity. But Kai had spent half his life reading cultivation novels. He knew the concept of Mana conductivity like a second language. And he had Earth biochemistry to build from.
*What if I create a compound that temporarily increases the body's Mana absorption rate? Not a permanent boost — just efficiency. Like a catalyst.* The creation system rewarded understanding. He understood cellular membrane permeability from biology. He understood the basic Mana structure from last night's analysis of the beast core residue. The bridge between them was a gap — but a narrower gap than anything this world's alchemists were working from, because they'd never had Earth physics as a foundation. *That's the one,* he thought. *If it works, it's not worth two hundred crystals at a scavenger stall. It's worth a small war.* He spent an hour just thinking. Not creating yet — *designing.* His INT stat made the process feel different than it ever had on Earth, like his brain was running on a cleaner frequency. Connections formed faster. He could hold more variables simultaneously. By the time the apartment was completely silent, he had a mental blueprint detailed enough to attempt. He began.
The visualization was the most complex thing he'd tried so far. Not a cup of water. Not a nutrition bar. A precise liquid compound with a specific molecular behavior — increasing cellular Mana uptake without destabilizing the user's meridians or dantian. He built it layer by layer, the way he used to design game systems, one mechanic at a time until the whole architecture held together. His Mana drain started immediately.
[Mana Cost: 14]
[Current Mana: 4/18]
He nearly blacked out. The vial that appeared in his hand was smaller than he'd intended — barely ten milliliters, deep blue liquid, slightly luminescent. His hands were shaking. His vision swam at the edges. *Too much. Way too much for current stats.* He sat still for several minutes, breathing slowly, waiting for the worst of the drain to pass. Then he looked at the vial properly. The liquid moved wrong — slightly thicker than water, with a faint inner glow that pulsed at roughly the same rate as his own Mana regeneration. As if it was already attuned. *Did it work or did I just nearly knock myself out making expensive glowing water?* Only one way to find out. He drank half. Left the rest — one dose wasn't worth risking a bad reaction at full volume with no medical backup. For thirty seconds, nothing. Then it hit. A deep, resonant warmth that started in his chest and spread outward through every meridian he barely knew he had. His Mana regeneration ticked once. Then again four seconds later instead of four minutes. He stared at the System panel.
[Mana Conductivity Enhancement Active]
[Mana Regen: 1 per 4 minutes → 1 per 18 sec]
[Duration: 22 minutes]
He sat very still for a moment. *One per eighteen seconds.* In twenty-two minutes, at that rate, he'd recover roughly seventy Mana. His cap was eighteen. He'd hit full and overflow — except Mana didn't overflow, it simply maxed and the enhancement kept ticking uselessly.
He needed a higher Mana cap. That meant raising his MAN stat. Which meant creating Stat Cores. Which now suddenly felt completely viable because— *I can farm my own Mana regeneration in twenty-minute windows.* He grabbed the scrap of paper and wrote beneath the list in fast, slightly shaky handwriting: *MAN stat core → higher cap → longer creation windows → better items → higher stats → repeat.* *This is the engine.* He spent the next twenty minutes creating at a pace he hadn't managed before.
Two more basic Stat Pills — better ones than yesterday, his understanding of the formula already sharper from the first attempt. A second vial of the Conductivity Enhancer, this time with slightly cleaner visualization — cost dropped from fourteen to eleven Mana. A small cache of the antiseptic solution, bottled in simple glass vials. By the time the enhancement faded, he had a collection sitting on his floor that hadn't existed two hours ago.
He looked at it for a long moment. *Three days. Four thousand crystals.* The tonics and antiseptics could move at the scavenger stall again — but slowly, for small amounts. That wasn't the play here. The Conductivity Enhancer was. One dose had nearly drained him completely — but that was *his* current MAN stat of eighteen. An E-rank or D-rank cultivator with a MAN stat of forty or fifty? The same compound would hit them like a freight train.
Twenty-two minutes of radically accelerated Mana regeneration, allowing back-to-back ability usage or cultivation sessions that would normally require hours of recovery. In this world's black market, that wasn't a two-hundred-crystal item.
That was an auction item. He needed a middleman. Someone who moved product without asking questions, had access to buyers with real money, and wouldn't trace anything back to an F-rank kid in the lower district. He thought about the scavenger perimeter. The scavengers themselves were too small. But there had been a stall near the eastern gate entrance — not the old woman he'd sold to, but a different one. Unlicensed equipment dealer. The kind of setup that implied connections to less official channels.
*Tomorrow morning.* He packaged the Conductivity Enhancer carefully in the cleanest vial he could create, sealed it with a wax-like compound for professionalism, and set it aside. Then he lay back on the floor, staring at the cracked ceiling, genuinely tired in a way that felt earned rather than defeated. His ribs still ached from Quick Step's strike. His Mana was running low again. Three days was a short window by any measure.
But the engine was running now. And somewhere in the black market tomorrow, a deep blue vial with a faint inner glow was going to make someone very powerful ask a very urgent question. *Who made this?* Kai closed his eyes and let himself smile in the dark. *Nobody you'd expect.*
To be continued